Symphony of Queer Errands, Rachel O’Neill
Tender Press, 2025

‘Dress us, Oh Errands, in mellifluence, as we are honey
flowing, effortless, unbroken.‘

from ‘Chant for Queer Errands’

Rachel O’Neill’s new collection, Symphony of Queer Errands, is a book that takes you by surprise. It is mysterious mesmerising memorable. How to lay my engagements on the screen for you without smashing or corroding the reading effect? This book, that traverses the wide stretch between predictability and obscurity, between resistance and embrace, is akin to a transposition of the creative process, of life itself. We are drawn into the interlaced polyphonic collaborative composition of a symphony, with instruments, musicians, rehearsals, trials, suggestions, score sheets. And everything strange, incredibly and wonderfully strange.

I am thinking this morning how these incomprehensible toxic times that we inhabit can infect slant intensify what and how we read. So this astonishing book, in this utterly vulnerable point in time, becomes fablesque, dystopian, surreal, hyperreal. And then, here I am in the heart and thick of the creative process. The heart and intricacy of love and life and how that matters so very much.

This is a book of first lines, of beginnings. It is a book of a guitar’s open tunings, say, where the chords shift and splice. We are listening to arrivals of the intangible, to energy and ether, to suspension and tendency. Or to ‘the ash of silence’. Listening. Listening. I cannot stop listening. And the musical key moves, and the wardrobe arrives with its physical store of clothes and dirt and flies. It’s personal effects and intimate affects.

Ah the lines that ring out as solo instruments: ‘all the voices yet to reach us’. ‘We who lavender time / are more essential than oils’.

Ah the queer instruments: for example, The Cathedral, The Wave, Bass Narcissus, and The Hard Soft Revolt. The latter is a pianoforte made of revolting parts that are neither plucked nor strummed but guillotined.

Old women are best. Generations matter. Pronouns matter. Tremulous holes matter. Sampling. Stolen land matters. Colonisation. Queer matters.

Queer errands are the sonic visual philosophical physical and deeply personal arrivals that score this symphony, this long-form poem. Queer errands that might be musical instruments or vital notes of gathering protest rally disobedience hotness dialogue collaboration . . . and yes, heart.

Symphony of Queer Errands is a sensory prickling, heart-and-idea stirring, body rippling, queer read, and I absolutely adore it. Thank you.

a reading

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‘The Hard Soft Revolt’

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‘The Wave’

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‘Anti-gaslighting Bowls’

four questions

Were there any highlights, epiphanies, discoveries, challenges as you wrote this collection?

While Symphony of Queer Errands is curious about the intersection of poetry and music, I increasingly feel that curiosity for collaboration shapes the experiential energy of the book. 

Contrapuntal poems, and poems inspired by contrapuntal music feature in the book. Contrapuntal poems involve bringing two distinct texts together to create another entire poetic experience out of their conversation. Contrapuntal music involves distinct melodies playing at the same time and interacting harmonically. Throwing in some creative licence here, I feel both point to an elsewhere through and beyond binary relationships.

Sound and language operate vertically and horizontally, as noise and silence, knowably and anonymously, yet in collaboration become multi-dimensional.

It’s a risky business. Collaboration involves trust and uncertainty, a deep understanding of oneself and other people and an openness to not knowing or knowing the least and needing to learn the most, it requires repair from failure, celebration, grieving, laughter and joy.

For me collaboration is a practice. Alongside a suspension of false hierarchies of human worth, we breathe life into alternative realities together, embodying these in the present.

What matters when you are writing a poem? Or to rephrase, what do you want your poetry to do?

Over the last year or so I’ve been experimenting with ‘audial’ poems by recording sounds in my immediate environment and making sound design works that become the seed for a new poem or sequence. My friend Andy Hummel invited me to open at his gig last year and I held a listening party, sharing some of the sound design works and reading poems inspired by them. While some poems are irreverent—Alexander the Great getting therapy in the afterlife; a poet planning to propose marriage to a melody; a music journalist conducting interviews as you would an orchestra—others reflect how, for me, writing through sound enables me to unlock potent emotions and memories. I want to continue to deepen and expand this practice.

Are there particular poets that have sustained you, as you navigate poetry as both reader and wr